“This order simply hastened the ruin of the interdicted.  The grand skinflint, the master usurer of the time, Jean V, duke of Brittany, refused to publish the edict in his states, but, underhandedly, notified all those of his subjects who dealt with Gilles.  No one now dared to buy the Marshal’s domains for fear of incurring the wrath of the king, so Jean V remained the sole purchaser and fixed the prices.  You may judge how liberal his prices were.

“That explains Gilles’s hatred of his family who had solicited these letters patent of the king, and why, as long as he lived, he had nothing to do with his wife, nor with his daughter whom he consigned to a dungeon at Pouzauges.

“Now to return to the question which I put a while ago, how and with what motives Gilles quitted the court.  I think the facts which I have outlined will partially explain.

“It is evident that for quite a while, long before the Marshal retired to his estates, Charles had been assailed by the complaints of Gilles’s wife and other relatives.  Moreover, the courtiers must have execrated the young man on account of his riches and luxuries; and the king, the same king who abandoned Jeanne d’Arc when he considered that she could no longer be useful to him, found an occasion to avenge himself on Gilles for the favours Gilles had done him.  When the king needed money to finance his debaucheries or to raise troops he had not considered the Marshal lavish.  Now that the Marshal was ruined the king censured him for his prodigality, held him at arm’s length, and spared him no reproach and no menace.

“We may be sure Gilles had no reason to regret leaving this court, and another thing is to be taken into consideration.  He was doubtless sick and tired of the nomadic existence of a soldier.  He was doubtless impatient to get back to a pacific atmosphere among books.  Moreover, he seems to have been completely dominated by the passion for alchemy, for which he was ready to abandon all else.  For it is worth noting that this science, which threw him into demonomania when he hoped to stave off inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich.  It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold, that he attempted the ‘great work’ for the first time.

“We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the chateau de Tiffauges.  That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism.”

“But all this,” said Des Hermies, “does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a ‘ripper’ of boys and girls.”